lord of the strings

Robb Flynn has likened the next Machine Head album

Catharsis to a Tolkiensized cinematic experience, as he readies it for release early in 2018. “It’s 15 songs and 75 minutes so it’s a journey, it’s a commitment!” he tells us from his home in the Bay Area. “In the same way that

The Lord Of The Rings is a commitment when you sit down and you’re stuck there for three and a half hours.” Grand compositions and themes are nothing new to the Oakland metallers, but it wasn’t premeditated.

“We just wrote and in some strange way we ended up having this theme that connected all the songs together,” he explains. “I don’t want to say it’s a concept record because that sounds so fucking pompous but in some ways it’s a pompous concept record! We started to remove songs and take them out but everyone has its place. I look at our records like they’re movies – there are ups and downs, mellow parts and quiet parts, a lot of storytelling and it just felt weird to take any songs out.

“The thing that was the most surprising for us was that it was this grooving, melodic record,” Flynn reveals. “It’s probably the least thrashy record we’ve ever done. There’s no reason it came out like that, it’s just that this melodic shit was what was getting our dicks hard. To me it’s the record that could have come after The Burning Red.” When January and a UK tour in May